Aditya Sinha: What's life without a little tamasha?

The crowd cheers for Prime Minister Narendra Modi during his road show in Varanasi yesterday PicPTIRichard B is my close friend We graduated from Stuyvesant High School in 1981 we lived in Queens New York he in Forest Hills and I in Flushing As teenagers we read Dostoevsky together and the first porno I watched was on a projector in his basement We together discovered India on an IndRail pass in the summer of 1982 along with another friend who has since become a ruthless venture capitalist Richard even visited Muzaffarpur Bihar We went to separate universities and lost touch after I left the US in 1986 The Internet reunited us in the late 1990s and weve met occasionally since then He physically changed mdash tall and lanky in high school he put on a lot of weight in his 30s and by his 40s was a hulking giant though his gentle nature was eternally endearingHe emailed on Saturday to say that two months ago oncologists determined that his prostrate cancer therapy was failing He had first informed me of his cancer in 2014 he had been battling it for ldquoa couple of yearsrdquo when it metastasized and cast a shadow over him Richard was on a clinical drug that kept him alive and he was optimistic that by 2020 cancer would be a manageable disease like diabetes ie chronic and treatable He invited me to the US to celebrate his 50th birthday that year but unfortunately I could not goRichard has published a few books in the US in which he reimagined the infamous 19thcentury teenaged murderer Lizzie Borden accused of axeing her parents to death as an Agatha Christietype brainy crime solver I bought his collection of short mysteries Lizzie Borden Girl Detective as well as his 2015 novel The Minuscule Monk in which a talking dog is key to solving the crime Reading these stories set in Victorian New England I could lucidly hear my friends voice and wit unchanged from our teenaged years Its a truism that when you read a book youre actually reading the writerIn his email Richard said as his cancer therapy was failing he was offered an immunotherapy trial using the clinical drug Keytruda which gained famed as ldquothe Presidents drugrdquo when administered to former US President Jimmy Carter last year Carters cancer had spread to his liver and brain and he had been given five weeks to live a few months of Keytruda however and he was declared cancerfree Richard naturally jumped at the offerThe first few days he was expectedly ill with chills and the flu But on the fourth day his platelet count plunged leading to heavy internal bleeding in his bladder He says it was painful Doctors are now trying to bring his platelet count up and determine if Keytruda was the culprit Today he starts a radiographic treatment to reduce the swelling and bring the platelet count back up By the weeks end his future should be clearerThis is deacutejagrave vu for me In 2010 my University roommate JeanEtienne Duboscq died of brain cancer He was a particle physicist at CERN in Geneva in the 1990s I cried and cried when I heard of his passing I wish I had visited him before he died we last met in 2002 when I drove up with my family to Cornell University where he taught and did research He was divorced and lived with his young daughter in later years he grew close to the widow of a friend also a particle physicist who earlier died of brain cancer When Jean was diagnosed he was treated at SloaneKettering in New York but the cancer was just too deeply lodged in his brain Perhaps there is a link between experimental physics and brain cancer but no physicist is likely to ever suggest thisI pray that Richards current cancer treatment works and he reaches remission and that we are able to meet again soon Journalist colleagues friends made during reporting assignments and various relatives have passed away but it is when friends from your youth stare death in the face that the full force of mortality hits youIts a clicheacute that mortality puts lifes mundane events into perspective and that it matters little if BJP wins UP or if Australia whups Indias ass in Bangalore or if hate crimes in the US are actually a subset of terrorism However when I think of the loved ones who are no more I feel as if they missed the drama of the world for these mundane events do matter These are the very things that fill up our life and make it worth living that make us want to go on till the end I hope Richard pulls through if only to exchange jokes about the tamasha we call lifeAditya Sinhas crime novel The CEO Who Lost His Head is available now He tweets autumnshade Send your feedback to mailbagmiddaycom